Sahara Blues

Tinariwen’s desert sound.

Using the same tools you’d find at Guitar Center, the band sounds deeply unfamiliar.Credit Photograph by ioulex

The music of Tinariwen, a Tuareg band whose members live in the Sahara Desert region that spreads across parts of Mali, Algeria, and Libya, is often compared to American blues. The band’s sound is rooted in electric and acoustic guitar, anchored by electric bass and some local percussion. The songs are in standard tuning, often lowered a half step and then played with a capo, making the strings slightly more taut and some fingerings easier. The yearning in the music and the sonorities of the strings resonate in ways that Americans are familiar with. It is less bright in tone and more dirgelike than the guitar patterns of masters to the south, like Diblo Dibala, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Tinariwen’s new album, “Emmaar,” is its best-engineered yet; previously the members have recorded outside—where they prefer to sleep—which worked better than you’d imagine. Properly captured, the sound in this record reveals two opposing pulls: you hear the pervasive sadness at its core, and the strength that the band can conjure when they play live. Their music swells to something almost as cathartic as loud rock music while being entirely unlike it.

I recently spoke with Eyadou Ag Leche, the band’s bassist, in New York. Most of the group’s lyrics are in Tamashek, a variety of the Tuareg language, but Ag Leche also speaks French. In addition to bass, he also plays guitar, adding percussion and singing as needed, which is typical of all the group’s members. Although he had some traditional sandals in his hotel room, he wore a black leather jacket and matching black leather Converse high-tops. (He pointed to the sandals and, smiling, said, “Trop froid maintenant.”) The term he used to describe Tinariwen’s music was “assouf,” which our translator rendered as “nostalgia.” Something seemed off with this word, and after several minutes of wrangling we arrived at the Portuguese “saudade,” and Ag Leche lit up. He described meeting a Portuguese musician and having roughly the same conversation. Ag Leche described the feeling as being “between happiness and sadness,” and it is the sound of having endured something acutely unpleasant, leaving the musician to bask in the complex joy of having survived, even though further hardships lie ahead. Or it can be as simple as being heartbroken, recovering, and knowing there is likely more heartbreak to come.

The heartbreak of Tinariwen has to do with staying on the road and missing their wives and children at home, where they are not necessarily safe. The Tuareg are a semi-nomadic people looking for a land, and the members of Tinariwen are easily their best-known ambassadors outside Africa. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib founded the band, in the early nineteen-eighties, with three other Tuareg, when they were in exile from Mali and living in Libya. Some founding members of the group have since died or dropped out, and other Tuareg have joined.

Deciphering the Tuareg’s role in the region’s current wars is not easy. Subjects of oppression, they were themselves longtime slave traders (and, by some accounts, a form of slavery still exists in some Tuareg communities). Their struggle to receive recognition from the government of Mali has led to several insurgencies, and the recent introduction of Islamist sects into the region has further complicated the situation. Last year, a member of Tinariwen, Abdallah Ag Lamida (known as Intidao), was kidnapped by Islamists in northern Mali. He was held for around ten days before escaping—the other guys in the band picked him up. As several journalists who have reported from the area said, the Tuareg have been “used” by both the Islamists and local governments. Though Tinariwen’s lyrics are more poetic than specifically political, the group is working to “spread the message,” as Ag Leche put it. While Tinariwen is popular in indie circles, it remains to be seen if that message is clear enough to convince those outside Africa to agitate on their behalf.

“Emmaar” is thicker and deeper in sound than its predecessor, “Tassili,” a largely acoustic affair that, like the new album, was released on the American label Anti-. “Emmaar” is the first Tinariwen release to be recorded in America, at a large house in Joshua Tree, in the California desert. Previously, Ag Leche said, “We were playing at home with our own bad-quality amps with batteries that were low, and the sound quality was not good.”

Although the album was produced by Patrick Votan, Tinariwen’s manager, the band took an active part in the direction of the recording. The New York guitarist Matt Sweeney, who played on the album, described the proceedings. “They would do a track and then they’d all come in and listen to it,” he said. “They’d all be kind of yelling notes about what should come up. It’s very, very involved—all of them.”

Tinariwen’s music doesn’t really bloom to full intensity until the band plays live and the moans become hollers and the room shakes with hand claps and singing. In this, too, Tinariwen is like the blues, but the music’s relationship to anything beyond the desert is easy to overstate. In fact, using roughly the same tools as anybody might find in a Guitar Center, Tinariwen sounds unlike anything American. Ag Alhabib takes many of the lead vocals, singing in a craggy baritone, and occasionally ceding the front spot to Ag Leche or two other band members. The vocals typically become group sing-alongs, so the concept of “lead singer” is almost irrelevant.

A song like “Imidiwan Ahi Sigdim” is roughly typical of the assouf style. A slow, loping figure is set up on one or two guitars. A bass guitar and a hand drum fill in beneath the guitars, but there are rarely any breaks that focus on anything but guitar. Because this isn’t a genre that places a premium on individual improvisations or solos, the few ornamental moments of guitar are brief. The urge in Tinariwen songs is always to regroup, and the music builds largely by the volume of the hand claps and how hard the guitar strings are plucked. Ag Alhabib sets up a line, and then the group repeats it. The lyrics, in Tamashek, speak in an open-ended fashion about exile, without naming any names, and sound more like scripture than like a protest song: “Friends, companions, hear my truth and my conviction. These banishments that befall us bring no joy, neither to my heart nor to that of the youth. You suffer the bitterness of that oppression, which annihilated the old folk on whom you counted and tortures the soul of the heart that knows no hatred.”

The line about “old folk” could be seen as literal—Ag Alhabib’s father was shot in front of him. And, though in Mali the band has been invited to perform at the Presidential palace, English-speaking audiences will be hard-pressed to know exactly how to identify with Tinariwen. The Tuareg have fought on several sides of the battle, usually for whoever seemed most likely to advance their cause. It is impossible to know if Tinariwen’s members know any hatred; their songs tend to the mournful more than the vengeful.

When discussing the band’s constant touring, Ag Leche noted that he felt that older musicians like Robert Plant and Carlos Santana have taken to Tinariwen’s music more readily than younger listeners. He said that in the sixties and seventies “people were feeling more the same feeling,” and that Tinariwen “must be part of that time, of that kind of period.” Though Ag Alhabib had access to some Bob Dylan cassettes, the group’s sound developed with very little influence beyond the music of the region. In the nineties, the band began to tour widely and found common cause with other music. In 2004, Ag Leche heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time. When he told me this, he broke into a huge smile and began to rock back and forth, as if praying. When I suggested that a collaboration between Hendrix and Tinariwen would make the best band of all, he nodded vigorously. ♦

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.